The workshop for my full-length play was yesterday. I’m still trying to mentally process everything. There’s something terrifying about hearing your entire brand-new play for the first time. I felt like I wanted to cry afterwards—not because I thought the whole thing sounded awful or because I was afraid of negative feedback, but because it was just such an emotionally draining experience to hear months of writing read aloud like that.
I finished my draft Wednesday night. It came in at 74 pages. Ideally I’d like to add ten more pages or so over the course of revision so that it’s closer to 80–85. I think I was so eager to be done that around page 70 I was just like, “end it NOW” and got to the conclusion a little too quickly. One of my classmates and I were both scheduled to workshop our plays on Thursday, and we were nervously emailing each other the night before about who we thought would go first and whether going first was better or worse.
Our professor ended up telling me that I was scheduled to go first when we got to class Thursday afternoon. I had six actors and then a seventh to read the stage directions, so it was a pretty big cast. My play, as I said before, is about a family in Somerville (where I grew up) and all of their problems sort of spiraling into a confrontation in the days leading up to Christmas. The professor told the actors to not be afraid to jump right in at a high level of intensity, and the reading began. The professor stopped the reading a few times to ask the actors to try reading something a different way or to give notes along the way, and once it was done, we talked about it more in depth.
She likes to start off every feedback session by asking the playwright, “What did you learn?” And I’d learned a lot. But it’s hard to formulate words to answer that question when the reading is still swimming around in your head. I have a fight scene shortly before the end of the play, and we talked about how a scene isn’t necessarily a climax because violence erupts or weapons are drawn, which, to use her example, happens regularly in a play like Romeo and Juliet, but rather because there is a great emotional shift that occurs in the characters. So the true climax of the play is occurring in the scene following the fight, and the fight is the scene which “tightens the screws” and sets up the climax/makes it inevitable. And while I think that’s what I’d wanted to have happen when I wrote the draft, it’s good to have it spelled out and in my mind when I go to revise those scenes and make sure that that is how they are functioning. I also have a very long and dialogue-heavy scene towards the middle of the play, and we talked about how to go back through that scene now that I know what the intentions and desires of each of the characters are, and make sure in their talking to each other that they’re always going after what they want. That way even though no one is actually doing anything, “action” is still occurring. And we talked about how one of the characters seems to be trying to “wrestle the play away” from one of the others, but that I can’t let that happen. My classmates also had some really great feedback and positive comments. And the actors seemed to have a lot of fun with the script, which is good.
My professor is really great and has been taking the time after everyone’s workshops to write them detailed notes about the draft, including suggestions for reading that might help them figure out their own work. Once I get those notes, we’ll probably set up a time to meet one-on-one to talk about it further sometime before my next workshop date. So I’m completely mentally exhausted, but overall it was a very productive week. It’s great to be done with that first draft, but the first draft really is only the beginning. There are many rounds of revision still ahead of me.